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Monday, July 13, 2009

After I first saw Transformers way back in 2007 I thought it was cool but I had one problem with it, namely:

Not enough robots.

The movie is called Transformers, not motion blur. Why do all the shots involving a robot have to be so jerky and fast that I feel like I'm watching home movies where my Uncle Mike has had too many margaritas and decided to pick up the video camera to record the festivities of Thanksgiving.

WTF, I saw no reason for this and hoped they would fix it in the sequel (which was highly implied by the end of the movie and some scenes shown during the credits).

An extension of the "not enough robots" motif was the fact that there were too many human characters that were essentially pointless. Why do I care that some blonde Aussie bitch is an A-plus hacker and who conveniently has a fat, black, cowardly, hacker friend that provides just the right amount of comic relief where it really isn't needed.

And why is there so much fan-service to the U.S. military? Did M. Bay sign his soul away to the army on the condition that he show some kind of military presence in every one of his movies? I wouldn't be surprised if he had a section of the Pentagon taped off specifically so he could film his movies there because (in a Pooh-type way) he can't keep his fucking nose out of the honey pot that is American Nationalism.

So I enjoyed the movie but I thought it could have used a lot of work. Then I started hearing stories about the sequel that was in production. And I read that M. Bay was limited by budget and couldn't get as many robot shots as he wanted but now that Transformers had done so well, the sequel would have a bigger budget and more robots.

Do you know what I fucking saw? I saw a bunch of robots with the exact same screen time as they had in the first movie, I saw two new partially mentally handicapped robots that served as comic relief, a random hispanic character added for comic relief and John Turturro reprising his role as a comic character who was important but has now fallen from grace. For a movie with so many characters aiming at providing comic relief it wasn't fucking funny.

The only thing I laughed at was the fact that M. Bay's promise of more robots was simply more fast moving, non-static camera shots of a bunch of shiny stuff. The robots were not characters, they were just there for eye candy and the fight scenes. I think only 3 of the Decepticons had lines in the film and pretty much only Optimus did any talking on the Autobot side. Why make the robots talk at all? If you want them to be so disposable why not just make them all mute, like Bumblebee. Even though his voice circuits were fixed in the first one Bumblebee spoke not a word through the entirety of the movie. Explanation?

"Voice still not working, huh?" - Meghan Fox's character

All in all this movie should never have been made. It was basically the first film with a slightly different plot. It had typical Bay American Military jargon, which had way to much focus. I remember a scene where a female operator in uniform states that their communications are down. I remember thinking, "why was this placed in the movie?" and I can't remember many scenes with robotic aliens, whom I thought were the main basis of the movie. The name of the movie should have been titled, "Shia LaBeouf does some stuff while hot chick does some stuff while the American Military does some stuff". That's it. Then someone could write on all the posters in marker, "Plus there are some robots". That seriously should have been what it was called because that's what it felt like.

Fuck Michael Bay.

If he made The Rock 2, I would watch it. If he made An American Explosion in Paris, I would watch it. But if he tried to make a remake to Citizen Kane, I would send him a box full of my shit.

Stick to what you are good at. Don't get people's hopes up by making a movie they actually want to see be good and just make a stupid pile of mind-numbing, story-less, fluff and leave real movies to the pros.